Wednesday, February 16, 2011

K is for Kryptonite

I'll post a picture when I get home, but for now I have work to do.
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A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Me

Laughter Erupts from the group of teens as a 20 sided die lands on the worst possible side. Out of the other 95%, it landed on a 1. This is my clean, well-lighted place; anywhere that I can be on a Saturday evening, playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. The escape from reality sets in quickly as I play, feverishly thinking about Montisqeau Fleetwood the Elf bard would do.
D&D isn't the only escape from the world that I have, though. I use creation of anything, whether it be the dungeon or epic battle in my head to a more fine art; music. When I need to escape from reality and nobody's there for me, it can be expected that i'll be in my sanctuary, playing or writing music. The feeling of singing in consonance to the chords I play takes me away from the worry and puts me right where I want to be: in with my music. Most of my songs are actually about fictional people, told from the perspective of an alter ego of mine. My core longs for creation, and so I indulge it whenever I can.
One cannot escape from the nothingness that is life, but one can live with it, or even accept it. When you let the nothingness fill you, you can find a peace, but only if you don't try to push it away. The nothingness neither hurts or helps us, but it only fights us when we try to keep it away. The Buddhists actually believe that nothingness is a good thing-- the state of "no mind" is a peace and quiet in the bustle of our lives as we struggle to fill our voids with superficial somethings.
"What is an hour?"
"More to me than him."
"An hour is the same."
An hour is a human creation, just another superficial "something" that we put in our lives to fill the void. Like the waiter in Hemmingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, many people struggle to try and squeeze every hour out of every day whilst doing something. More somethings. We can't get rid of them, really, no matter what we do, it's in our nature to try and fill the void. A person weighed down with "somethings" would think that they must be home by a certain time so that they can do what they do every day; nothing, in the scheme of the universe.